POETRY

POETRY

THE NATURE OF MEN

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.9K views

The organ grinder sets up his pitch at dawn

opposite the Hotel Belvedere Du Mer,

and waits. His monkey, in a sullied red cap

with tarnished bells, scrabbles, beside the corniche,

among the beds of white oleander.

 

The hotel doorman sends a page boy across

with a message and a coin. He watches –

shielding his eyes from the sea’s dazzle –

as the boy speaks to the organ grinder,

who completely ignores him. He returns,

with the coin, embarrassed and affronted.

 

The doorman watches the organ grinder,

who continues to stare, as he has since dawn,

at the drawn blinds and the shut windows

of the hotel’s Seraglio Suite,

where the Prince is dying…

 

We should assume

that all the characters in this story

have names that were bestowed at birth or

in captivity – or have been acquired –

though we will not learn their names. We might

also have assumed thus far in the story

that all the characters are male –

but the page boy is the doorman’s

pre-pubescent daughter with hair cut short,

and the monkey is the matriarch

of a small colony of capuchins

the organ grinder keeps in a deserted

mosque near the docks…

 

There is traffic now

on the corniche, and hurrying workers

along the promenade, briefly curious

about the silent organ grinder,

and his monkey busy among the flowers.

 

A cab stops at the hotel. The doorman descends

to greet the Prince’s prodigal daughter,

whom, we may assume, both has a name

and is the gender she chooses to be.

A low sided wagon passes, carrying

a tethered, blinkered, braying donkey.

 

Suddenly the blinds are raised in the suite,

and a nun opens the long windows wide –

to let the Prince’s soul return to his

vine-covered estates beyond the mountains,

or banish the lingering smell of death,

and replace death’s rattle with the sea’s soft roar.

 

The grinder begins to turn the organ’s wheel,

and along the corniche and through the town’s

boulevards and alleyways the plangent

music plays of Desedemona’s

final aria from Verdi’s ‘Otello’:

‘Hail Mary, full of grace, chosen among wives

and virgins…’ From among the oleanders

the matriarchal monkey emerges,

removes her worn cap and bells, and capers.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

A MEMORY OF MUSHROOMS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

Once upon a time, fifty eight years ago,

I got a bus I did not normally get.

It took me down a street where I had not been

since I was a child. I passed the house –

English farmhouse-style, four-square, low roofed,

the small orchard intact – where we live now.

I noted then how out of place it seemed

in a street of petit-bourgeois villas,

Victorian and Edwardian.

I thought of Tennyson on the Isle of Wight,

after the publication of ‘The Charge…’.

The lane outside his house became so filled

with fans, who had taken the ferry

across the Solent, that he had built

wooden steps and a walkway above the lane,

so that he could go unmolested

each morning into the beech woods, and return

his signature hat in the crook of his arm

brimming with wild mushrooms.

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

BENLLECH BAY LATE SPRING 2021

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

All the songbirds of North Wales this afternoon

it seems – in the old woodlands behind the beach –

are singing their undaunted polyphonies.

Three narrow streams trickle onto the strand.

Under the glinting grains of sand is water.

A flock of oyster catchers speeds squeaking

along the sea’s edge. On the horizon,

where there are always ships – sailing at high tide,

or anchored at low water – there are none

this late afternoon waiting to cross the bar,

only layers of cumulus catching

the last of the sun above the large island

beyond the empty skyline to the north.

An owl hoots in the woods. Perhaps there will be

dolphins out in the bay.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

A SORT OF KADDISH

David Selzer By David Selzer9 Comments1 min read2.2K views

Today, entering the house from the garden,

I turned, involuntarily, to look back,

but saw nothing more than what is always there,

small rooms of eclectic evergreens – olive,

camellia, rhododendron, bay –

and, for some reason, I thought of my father

dead for almost as long as I have lived.

 

I have shuffled what I know of him

like a pack of cards in a game of patience

for a lifetime – would he approve, be proud,

that twenty six year old secular Jew

from North West London, a personable

young man by all accounts, whose friends were artists?

 

As I grew old enough to be his father,

and then his grandfather, I began

to think of him less and less with longing,

but always as my loss, and my mother’s,

when she lived, and his family’s – and my loss

had as much to do with a heritage lost

in that pack of cards as with lost love.

 

Today, I thought, for the first time, of what

he had lost – of all those years never known,

of all the sweetness of being alive –

and hoped, as he lay dying from sepsis

four thousand miles from those he loved,

he became too delirious to see

what he would never know.

 

 

 

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POETRY

FROM A BALCONY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2K views

A flock of goosanders fishes in the Straits,

as ubiquitous oyster catchers whistle

on the shore. In the early evening

the air about our balcony throngs

with birds – swallows whispering, swifts screeching,

two ring-necked doves cooing in the clematis,

and a small flock of sparrows chattering

below – as the last sun shades the mountains

opposite. By night three fishermen

make their profaning way along the pier

with swaying torches. The seeming darkness

above the peaks is thronged with unnamed stars

we cannot see, and their imagined,

and fabled harmonies.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE MOLD CAPE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.2K views

In what is now the back garden of a house –

a between-the-wars semi – in Mold, a town

in North East Wales, a gang of labourers,

one hundred and seventy years ago,

hired to demolish a burial mound –

known as Bryn yr Ellyllon, Goblin’s Hill –

uncovered what seemed to be small sheets of brass

on a small, fragmentary skeleton.

Cleaned, fitted together, a local scholar

declared them a Bronze Age cape of gold,

perhaps made to fit a royal child.

Since then the cape has been exhibited

in a glass case in the British Museum.

Imperial kleptocracy at work.

An artefact of such exquisite design

and craftsmanship could not have been allowed

to remain in a small market town where most

did not speak English, and were illiterate

in their own language. It was a place ringed

by the mining of iron, lead and coal;

a place where a riot about workers’ rights –

a reduction in wages, and miners

forbidden their mother tongue underground –

required four rioters to be shot dead

by soldiers of the King’s Own regiment.

After the discovery the mound was

completely razed. No record has been found

of the disposal of the bones.

Note 1: Ellyllon is pronounced ‘ethleethlon’

Note 2: The poem has been published in the 2022 winter edition of EAP: The Magazine – https://exterminatingangel.com/the-mold-cape/.

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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